ARNALDO DIAS BAPTISTA
Arnaldo Dias Baptista is known for his great influence in Brazilian youth music from 1967, at first as founder and leader of Os Mutantes, and later in the course of his post-1973 solo career until now. From 1983 onwards, he embraces brushes and paints to release an artistic expansion that has been latent in his soul since the 1970s.
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer and visual artist, Arnaldo Dias Baptista has never stopped creating and pointing to an unforseen future. His artistic and personal story is described in the chronological biography available here. The impact of his visual works is described by curators such as Márcio Harum and Rodrigo Moura, whose texts are presented here in the virtual exhibition halls.
visual works
Arnaldo’s visual arts reflect his philosophy, poetry, sense of humor and avant-garde creativity, already known in his musical career. Arnaldo works spontaneously, experimentally and with an emphasis on the fantastic imagination. Expressiveness through the use of colors and textures permeates both the universe of psychedelia, metaphysics, and contemporary art. Arnaldo does not go through filters like other artists. His drawings and paintings are very close to writing, like a fable. There is an intense characteristic.
“ When I paint, I sometimes have inspirations from my musical knowledge and, in other cases, they are visual inspirations. It is the expression of what my soul says about the sun, about the clouds … I built this new path of creation, for seeing my soul in a way that connects music to the visual arts’’, observes Arnaldo.
This vast universe of unique strength and mythology can never be precisely defined or reduced to a category. As Jean Dubuffet said: “art by essence is new (…). Only one regime is healthy for artistic creation: that of permanent revolution.”
(with excerpts from Emma Thomas Gallery curatorial text for the exhibition “Magnetic Lens”, 2012)
